BOY SCOUT MOVEMENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 925, 3 May 1957, Page 11

BOY SCOUT MOVEMENT

Sir--In The Listener (February 1) Mr J. Stewart Smith stated that the movement might have been suggested to Baden-Powell by an eccentric parson who worked in the East End of London. On February 15 Mr Howard L. Trotman suggested that the movement originated from the Boys’ Brigade. In fact, the movement had many "springs of action." Perhaps the most important was the work of Thompson Seton, who lived at Cos-Cob Park near New York. Seton set up an Indian camp in an endeavour to find a healthy amusement for the street arabs of New York. Some persons believed that Seton was a "stunt merchant," but he had many fine qualities. The rules of the Indian camp were put together on the Birch Bark Roll. I quote from Sir William Beach Thomas’s A Traveller in News: "The ingenuities of this local scheme were developed later, as all the world knows, into a worldwide organisation by the ability of General Baden-Powell, who deserves as well of the human race as any man alive." All societies and all "movements" have their black moments. Seton was ingenious in the devising of games and the instruction of wood-lore, and this was the secret of Baden-Powell’s attraction. There was an arrangement between Seton and Baden-Powell as to the publication of the Birch Bark Roll in America and the Boy Scout’s book in Britain. An unlucky dispute arose, and Sir William Beach Thomas acted as arbitrator, with excellent results. I have mentioned only one of the many "sources" of the Boy Scout Movement.

D.

MacMILLAN

(Christchurch).